The Committee to Nuke Elysium

In the zones around the Fukushima power plant, some are stuck in their homes, fearful of radiation, heeding government warnings to stay indoors, cut off without electricity or phone service. Others want to leave but have no petrol. Still more, whose homes were ruined, wait for evacuation at crowded shelters. All face dwindling supplies of heating fuel, food and water.

“Those who can leave have already left,” says Nanae Takeshima, 40, a resident of Minamisoma, a city of 70,000 about 24 kilometres from the nuclear plant.

Many of those left behind are elderly people whose houses survived the earthquake but who feel abandoned as other residents flee the nuclear crisis. They say city officials and the police are unsighted, stores and offices are closed and streets are empty.

Hatsuko Arakawa, 78, says that although her city, Iwaki, is outside the area covered by the government order to stay indoors, delivery trucks refuse to enter. She is marooned in her home, with no propane for her heater and dwindling supplies of rice and water. She endures the winter cold by spending the entire day wrapped in a futon.

“Unlike those in the refugee centres, I have no contact with the outside,” she said. “My supplies are reaching their limits.”

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The frustration is that Ichinomaki does have at least one working supermarket, opposite the town’s police station, but shoppers must queue for two or three hours, can buy only 10 items at most and must pay cash, which is not possible if your house has been washed away.

“They say on the television that aid is being delivered, that food is coming, but you can see for yourself it is not,” says a man filching petrol, who declines to be named. “I thought we were a wealthy country, but now I don’t know what to think,” he adds, explaining that he is surviving on food from his home freezer.

Near Fukushima, government orders to evacuate a 20-kilometre radius and for those who live 20-to-30 kilometres away to stay indoors, have turned communities such as Minamisoma into virtual ghost towns. Only the unwilling or unlucky remain.

Fisherman Misao Saito, 59, says he stayed in Soma, a small port city 43 kilometres north of the plant, because of his parents, who are too old and infirm to flee.

“It’s scary, but when it comes to the nuclear accident, I have no choice but to die here. I think this is the government’s fault. The Prime Minister should have had a better grip on what was happening at that nuclear plant.”

But some who remained say they did so by choice. Misako W seems proudly defiant in her desire to remain in Minamisoma, but she is also angry about her community’s fate. “Minamisoma is defunct,” she says.